Screen: WSVGA rather than IPS, colors still look good, touch screen very responsive, accelerometer fast, works in all directions

User Experience

Interface: easy to pick up

Screen: black bezel on top and bottom is touch sensitive; swiping finger up from bottom minimizes apps and shows home screen; menu or status bar accessed by swiping down from top or diagonally from top left; swiping from lower left or right side switched between open apps

Notifications: accessed by tapping on them in status bar; dismissed by swiping from left to right

Apps

In addition to apps built in Adobe Air, PlayBook supports older BlackBerry OSapps and (though not at launch) Android 2.x apps

Ships with a variety of pre-installed apps

To access BlackBerry mail client, BlackBerry Messenger, address book: must connect BlackBerry devices to PlayBook through a Bridge mode that allows PlayBook to access data without storing it; non-BlackBerry owners need to use a web client to receive and send email

Browser

Supports Adobe Flash 10.2 out of the box, but some heavily Flash-based sites like Google Maps didn’t work well in PlayBook’s browser

Facebook: user can’t get notifications from Facebook or easily accessed messages from a central location

Connectivity and Camera

Both cameras have solid optics

PlayBook too large to act as a real optical device; should work well in the field and forvideo chat

Mini-HDMI port: allows users to interact with content, games and video on a second screen

Ability to sync wirelessly with your desktop or laptop computer

Sink or Swim?

Appeal of PlayBook currently limited to existing BlackBerry smartphone customers as a result of email and messaging limitations

Ben Parr’s article, “Apple Unveils Final Cut Pro X,” on Mashable.com, offers some details about this rebuild of the 12-year-old video-editing software introduced at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show in Las Vegas:

First 64-bit version

Can utilize all eight cores and more than 4 GB of RAM for professional editing on the Mac

Wayne, one of the co-founders, got cold feet and sold his 10% stake in less than two weeks;

1985 — CEO John Sculley forced Jobs out of the company; and

1997 — Jobs was brought back when Apple “was on the brink of destruction.”

Apple’s golden years followed with wildly successful products such as the iPod, iMac, MacBook, iPhone and the iPad.

So, what’s in store for Apple in the next 35 years? Parr believes Apple will dominate a post-PC “world of mobile devices … for decades to come” by competing “on design and user experience” instead of hardware specs.

Someday Jobs will leave some big shoes to fill. Parr wonders “whether anybody can provide the design and product vision” Jobs brought to the company in his “quest to redefine technology.”

Mark Potts, journalist and digital pioneer, spoke to our class today. He helped create the Washington Post website, served as editor for various news websites and has worked in the media field for nearly 20 years.

Potts showed us a variety of different websites that all present unique ways of telling stories:

Wikipedia — As soon as a story breaks, there is always a collection of new data and compilations by citizen journalists. A lot of journalists look down on Wikipedia, but Potts believes it’s a great tool for researching.

Washington Post article “A Facebook Story” — used Facebook as a story telling device to create a human-interest story

Storify– Pulls pictures and tweets to create a unique storytelling platform. However, it doesn’t work for everything. A downside is that the reader has to pull together the story themself without any transitions.

Potts also explained the term crowd sourcing, which is asking the audience what they know and letting them report on what they find. For example, certain news outlets might ask the public to call in when there is a pothole somewhere or allow them to go through government documents to see if they can turn up any suspicious information.

“Twitter is nothing but noise,” said Potts. It has “a fire hose of stuff.” Potts believes that at times Twitter can be useful, and says it is an excellent publicity tool and something necessary that journalists should keep up with. However, Potts says there are too many posts without filters, something I definitely agree with.

When asked what the most important tool for journalists in the last five years has been, Potts pointed to his iPhone.

Potts encourages the use of a variety of different mediums for telling stories and writing articles. “You don’t have to tell every story in words,” said Potts.

OMG and LOL, along with FYI, are all, according to the OED, “initialisms associated with the language of electronic communications.” It’s interesting to note that the first use of OMG dates back to a 1917 letter and in 1960 LOL meant “little old lady.” Official recognition for a word seems to be as slow as the beatification process. Who knew?

A symbol for the verb “love,” the heart sign “may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper stickers.” In the future, we should brace ourselves for a flood of new entries based on the new social media.

There are many other new entries you can check out for yourself by clicking here. My favorites are “doughnut hole,” a dessert made from the cut out center of a doughnut, and “muffin top,” defined as “a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers.” Too many of the first can definitely lead to the second.

We’re really looking forward to having you all in Minnesota this weekend for Steve’s memorial service. Below are details for the weekend. Please e-mail Mike at mwesleybuttry@gmail.com if you have any questions. Friday There has been a CHANGE in Friday evening’s plans. We ended up having too many people for bowling at Pinstripes (a good […]

The LSU Manship School of Mass Communication will also be holding a memorial service in honor of Steve at 4:30 Monday, April 3 at the Holliday Forum in the LSU Journalism Building. Further details are in the link below. Buttry Memorial Service

We’d like to thank everyone again for the continuing love and support we’ve received since Steve’s passing. This post is to remind and provide some more details for Steve’s memorial service, which will take place at 4pm, Saturday April 8, at the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Minneapolis, MN. Directions to the venue are also […]

What’s the reaction you have when you see a speaker who’s nervous? Chances are, you probably catch the feeling, feel their suffering, and cringe at the thought that it could be you. Then you’ll probably start hoping that it will never be you. Fear is a powerful emotion and is extremely contagious. It’s normal to […]

Democratic hopeful Stacey Abrams has effectively conceded the Georgia gubernatorial race to secretary of state Brian Kemp after an election and vote count riddled by claims of voter suppression. “I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” Abrams said at a press conference […]

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters on Thursday that the company was dropping its contract with an opposition research firm that had been hired to spread negative stories about its rivals, he adopted a moralistic tone and did his best impression of Claude Rains in Casablanca. In addition to claiming ignorance about his company’s […]